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FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS

09-01-2010, 05:10 PM

Phoronix: FreeBSD Will Continue Supporting ZFS, Here's ZFS v28

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode...

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You don't want to be running FUSE, really. The native linux kernel ZFS project is interesting, but lacking severely against the matured ZFS support in FreeBSD.

Also, FreeBSD has advantages over any other OS implementing ZFS; as far as i know only FreeBSD supports booting from RAID-Z arrays.

FreeBSD is not just getting a higher ZFS version, it's getting all code that Oracle/OpenSolaris ever released on ZFS. So if that is the 'official' end of ZFS then it can live on as opensource with CDDL-license in ZFS tree, and IllumOS and FreeBSD project work together on improving it.

If that is the future of ZFS then FreeBSD might be the primary OS that runs it. Though it would be nice if Linux users also got it eventually, even though their Btrfs project would have overlapping goals.

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And this is what Pawel said on the mailinglists, when announcing his new experimental ZFS v28 patchset:

This patchset is also a message we, as the FreeBSD project, would like to send to our users: Eventhough OpenSolaris is dead, the ZFS file system is going to stay in FreeBSD.
At this point we have quite a few developers involved in ZFS on FreeBSD as well as serveral companies.
We are also looking forward to work with IllumOS.

Comment

FreeBSD is not just getting a higher ZFS version, it's getting all code that Oracle/OpenSolaris ever released on ZFS. So if that is the 'official' end of ZFS then it can live on as opensource with CDDL-license in ZFS tree, and IllumOS and FreeBSD project work together on improving it.

I don't recall hearing anyone saying that the closed source Solaris project wouldn't be pushing CDDL'd sources out, definitely. Mostly that they wouldn't push them out as early as before. If they still push code out, it could mean ZFS will continue getting new versions though it might well be that the ZFS in FreeBSD and such starts slowly diverging from Solaris one considering Oracle decides the future direction of ZFS and FreeBSD and folks might end up patching their own stuff in.